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7-Way Low-End Open-Source Linux GPU Comparison

10-17-2013, 04:30 PM

Phoronix: 7-Way Low-End Open-Source Linux GPU Comparison

If you're in the market for a low-end graphics processor that's compatible with Linux and the available open-source Mesa/Gallium3D graphics drivers, here's a roundup of benchmark results for seven different AMD, Intel, and NVIDIA graphics processors.

And it seems several times faster than a haswell i3 (and the i5/i7 are just a bit faster than i3). Hope AMD keeps improving the open source support, and perhaps in a year or two I'll add a discrete card to my Haswell system (using haswell graphics at the moment, open source support is superb)

Comment

In terms of just graphics performance, is there any difference between Haswell on the different grades of processor? I'm unlikely to ever care about the performance of an i3, but I'd be interested in how an i5 or or i7 compared...

And it seems several times faster than a haswell i3 (and the i5/i7 are just a bit faster than i3). Hope AMD keeps improving the open source support, and perhaps in a year or two I'll add a discrete card to my Haswell system (using haswell graphics at the moment, open source support is superb)

Comment

The Haswell is doing well FPS-wise, but when you look at the peak frame latency, it loses to everything except 5450 (and the Nv card, but I only care about the red side).

It would if it ran r600g. It's power efficiency is great, it's basically the only no-extra-power, passive card with good performance.

If one is going to buy a low-end card, one is not going to care much about performance.
And if performance is not going to be an issue then the driver used is not going to be much of a concern because it just needs to be capable of hardware accelerating desktop compositing and running games at at least 30 - 45fps.
And if the driver is not going to be much of a concern that it doesn't matter what driver it runs on as long as it works and successfully fulfills the requirements stated in the previous sentence.

Comment

If one is going to buy a low-end card, one is not going to care much about performance.
And if performance is not going to be an issue then the driver used is not going to be much of a concern because it just needs to be capable of hardware accelerating desktop compositing and running games at at least 30 - 45fps.
And if the driver is not going to be much of a concern that it doesn't matter what driver it runs on as long as it works and successfully fulfills the requirements stated in the previous sentence.

I beg to differ. An APU does that and more. My Haswell i5 does very nicely with gaming at moderate resolutions, not to mention the mundane compositing. But buy looking at these plots, it looks like some of the ~ 50 USD cards would give me a 2X, 3X or more increase. I wouldnt buy them now becasue I'm fine at the moment, and I love the official open source support from Intel. But AMD's drivers keep improving, and at some point I'll be able to buy one of those, and by that time, the gap will be much larger, so the purchase will be more of a no brainer.

Comment

If one is going to buy a low-end card, one is not going to care much about performance.
And if performance is not going to be an issue then the driver used is not going to be much of a concern because it just needs to be capable of hardware accelerating desktop compositing and running games at at least 30 - 45fps.
And if the driver is not going to be much of a concern that it doesn't matter what driver it runs on as long as it works and successfully fulfills the requirements stated in the previous sentence.

Just because I care more about noise (passive) and electricity costs (W) than raw performance doesn't mean I don't care about performance. Obviously I want the best performance possible, that also satisfies the more important conditions.

There are other points too (tearing (glamor), stability, features or lack of) not in radeonsi's favor.